Eyes, Mouth and Headlights

Rust

Photo by Laurenz Notter on Unsplash

I’ve got rust in my eye.

Not floating in the weird tear water that surrounds the eye, that wet you rarely touch but can see, but a thin slice of rust stuck in my eyeball.

Rikkovan shit-ditched me from Yates Materials, mid shift. Camera caught me selling some scrap over the fence.

It ain’t definitive or nothing, not really. Ya couldn’t tell it was me if ya didn’t know it was me and I know it was me so I told Rikkovan to blow it out his dick, falsely accusing me of stealing and I left, talking about a lawyer I’ll never hire.

Tommy Loryea drives me to work, and he didn’t get accused of stealing because he wasn’t, so I just walked down Broughton, cut up to County Parkway and started walking.

Bout a quarter mile from Ridge Road I started cussing myself out, kicking gravel, kinda sorta but not really hoping one of the Steffur Logging trucks would hit me.

I saw the muffler from about twenty feet away. Thought it was a dead raccoon and I was happy to kick a dead raccoon.

Wish it had been a dead raccoon.

I kicked the damn muffler like it was Rikkovan’s nuts or even my own nuts for being dumb enough to get caught selling a hundred sixty bucks worth of scrap to Iggy Warren, over the fence by the railroad tracks.

I kicked that muffler and part of it sailed and part of it just disintegrated.

It made a sound, a sound like I don’t know, like a Red Wing steel toe hitting a rusty ass muffler I guess.

There was another sound too, a shuffling and scuffling. That sound scared me, startled me is more like it and a four point buck tore out of the woods.

Deer headed toward Ridge Road on a diagonal and right into the headlights of a Steffur Logging Peterbilt coming up County Parkway.

That deer and that truck made a sound too.

Can’t describe it other than to say it almost made the Yates Materials vending machine charburger come flying back up where it went in.

I blinked as the truck smeared with deer parts drove by me. I mean I must have blinked before that too but now I could tell something was wrong, my vision was messed up.

Then it started hurting, burning. Another mile down the road I started thinking maybe the deer put a curse on me my eye hurt so bad.

To tell you the honest to Moses truth I might not even have come to the hospital if it wasn’t closer than my house.

I got a few Oxy’s at the house, and those would be a lot cheaper than the emergency room.

But Dellford Regional saved me about a mile and a half.

And the nurse asked me how I got something in my eye.

I could have told her I kicked a rusty muffler.

But that sounds stupid.

I told her I work at Yates Materials.

She said “And Yates Medical sent you here without flushing your eye?”

I said “I came straight here because I didn’t want the idiots at the plant infirmary touching me.”

The nurse shivered back like I bit her.

“You know Sondra Wiler at the Yates Infirmary?”

My mouth opened to say yes. But I could see good enough to know that this nurse was Sondra Wiler’s daughter, or niece or someone who didn’t appreciate me yapping.

I got rust in my eye.

I’m waiting for em to take it out.

They didn’t give me any Oxy.

There’s a dead deer on County Parkway.

I’ve got $160 in my pocket.

Sondra Wiler might see the dead deer on her way into work at the Yates Materials Infirmary tomorrow.

But I won’t.

***

Like this? Like me? Please subscribe or throw me a few ducats at Venmo: James-Graham-80